ECI Cannot Conduct Citizenship Test Under The Guise Of SIR: Petitioners Tell Supreme Court

The petitioners challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process argued before the Supreme Court today that the Election Commission of India has no authority to determine a person's citizenship under the guise of the SIR exercise.A bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was hearing a batch of pleas assailing the SIR initiated across several states. Last week, the petitioners had argued that the Representation of the People Act, 1950 does not empower the ECI to conduct the SIR in its present form.Senior Advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for various petitioners, submitted that the SIR indirectly requires voters to prove their citizenship before the ECI. “The ECI has no power under Article 324 to conduct a citizenship test,” he argued. He explained that the process creates a list of persons presumed to be voters and then places the burden on them to prove their citizenship.“It presumptively puts me on a temporary citizenship list, and then I have to prove that I am a citizen. This is very serious. You have arrogated to yourself something that does not exist,” he said. Singhvi stressed that only the Union under Sections 8 and 9 of the Citizenship Act, or courts under the Foreigners Tribunal Act, can determine citizenship. Electoral officers cannot, he added, as that would effectively amount to an NRC-type process.He argued that requiring EROs to scrutinise citizenship documents, flag suspected non-citizens or report them to the Home Department is ultra vires the Constitution and creates an indirect NRC without Parliamentary sanction.He relied on the judgment of the Supreme Court in Lal Babu Hussein (1995) to buttress his arguments. He pointed out that as per the Lal Babu Hussein judgment, a person included in the voters' list is presumed to be an Indian citizen and the burden is on the objector to prove otherwise. However, in the SIR, the entire burden is reversed, and the voters are asked to prove citizenship even if they are included in the voters list.On Article 14, Singhvi questioned the three sub-classifications created under the SIR. He questioned the basis of 2003 cut-off, and required all voters who joined the list after 2003 to show details of their parents/ancestors. The cut-off is arbitrary and violates Article 14, Singhvi said.He also reiterated that SIR under the 1950 Act was envisaged only as a targeted exercise for particular constituencies, not an en masse revision of an entire state. He relied on Section 21 (3) of the Act to underline this point.Bihar SIR Data - Sharp Drop In Women Voters Only In Span Of 6 Months : Adv Vrinda Grover Highlights Advocate Vrinda Grover submitted that she had filed an application seeking the disaggregated data on the Bihar voter list after the SIR process. Referring to the ECI's reply dated 30th October, 2025,She noted that female voters stood at 3 crore 70 lakh in January 2025, but dropped to 3 crore 49 lakh by July 1, 2025. “Six percent of female voters are missing. The sex ratio has fallen from 914 to 892,” Grover submitted, adding that such a sharp fall in six months can only be attributed to the SIR.She emphasised the practical hurdles women face in producing documents, especially after marriage and relocation. With only 28.8 percent of women in Bihar educated up to Class 10, she argued that requirements like obtaining family genealogy records are unrealistic and impose a systemic disadvantage." To be able to go to the sarpanch and get your panshavali or family genealogy is not possible in the village that you are now living in for an adult married woman, and therefore, there is a particular systemic disadvantage that women are going to suffer, for which there was no accommodation made in the SIR, unlike form 6." Grover said,30 BLOs Committed Suicide Due To Extreme Work Pressure; ECI Not Being Transparent : Prashant Bhushan Argues Appearing for ADR, Prashant Bhushan highlighted reports of 30 Booth Level Officers dying by suicide due to extreme work pressure during the SIR. He questioned the urgency of the exercise and the expectation that BLOs collect forms from crores of people within a short window, including migrant workers." This kind of exercise has never been done before. And why this hurry? Why is it leading to a situation where 30 BLOs have committed suicide . You are saying that you get this enumeration form filled by crores of people. Every BLO is supposed to go from house to house, What happens to the migrant workers? How will they fill? You have given such a short time window and put such unreasonable pressure, for what?" Bhushan also criticised the ECI for refusing to provide machine-readable voter data and for not publishing details of additions and deletions as mandated by the election manual. He submitted that a lack of transparency obstructs public scrutiny."On top of that you say you will not follow any norms of transparency...you will not give voters' list in machine-readable form, so that...

ECI Cannot Conduct Citizenship Test Under The Guise Of SIR: Petitioners Tell Supreme Court

Anmol Kaur Bawa

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